


Have You Ever Seen The Rain

by neaf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-10
Updated: 2013-04-10
Packaged: 2017-12-08 01:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/755438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neaf/pseuds/neaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is broken, and Dean knows who to blame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have You Ever Seen The Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Epilogue to 5x04 The End, written at the time it aired.

Streetlights cast thin lines of shadow on the ceiling, buildings blocking this light or that to give each form a jagged edge against the fine cracks in the plaster. Headlights sprayed new light occasionally across the room, and Dean watched as each rough outline on the ceiling morphed into gaunt and sickly figures of stumbling human beings. 

He rubbed his eyes, forcefully, trying to blur the lines behind his eyelids – but whenever he opened them again, the shadowy strangers staggered on down the ugly wallpaper of the motel room in every passing wave of light, before it slipped to black. In the darkness, he shuddered, and fought the rise of bile in his throat.

Sam snored on, a mammoth figure tipped onto one side, his massive frame rising and falling under faded bedspreads across the room. Dean felt suddenly grateful at least one of them could sleep.

Dean was grateful there was more than one of them, again.

Another streetcar passing wove a haunting picture through patches on the curtains, like maps where the fabric had worn thin. He tried to breathe. 

It was a finely tuned art form he’d mastered without even being aware, getting out of bed in perfect silence. Sliding into his clothes, like a runaway morning-after, all of tip-toe and wary tread. He closed the door behind him and jammed his motel key into a jacket pocket, followed by his balled up fists as the cold air closed around him. His boots crunched faintly on the asphalt of the pothole-ridden parking lot, and he passed the entrance gate without so much as a backward glance.

The street had fallen silent now – now, finally, that he was away from the lurching figures painting the motel room walls. He crossed beneath a streetlight, and pushed on through the chill to the grass beyond where a park bench stood, rippled with dewfall.

There was a moment his breath caught heavy in the air, steam rising, that he thought he saw a figure in the trees. His pace slowed, his hands moving instinctively to concealed weapons. The shadows melted as another car passed, and he let his muscles relax with relief. Too long a hunter, too many shadows.

He stopped by the bench, and eyed it a moment as he dug his flask from his jeans pocket. As the whiskey burned down his throat he closed his eyes, and let the sensation wash over him. 

His mind rattled with the memories of what would be, now paper-thin pictures sliding in and out of focus like his motel ghosts as each set of headlights faded to black again. Without thinking, without realizing, he laughed aloud. He stopped when he heard himself - that sick, wet, humorless and altogether alien sound coming up from his ribcage.

“You know,” he said softly, resting his hand on the back of the bench and letting the moisture bead beneath his fingers. “You know – I figured it out.”

There was no reply, but he wasn’t waiting for one. He pushed his flask back into his pocket.

“It took me a minute, ‘cause, y’know,” he waved his hand by his head mockingly. “It was smack bang in the middle of a lot of fucked up shit that happened to me this week. But I did, I figured it out. Detroit.”

“That was it, wasn’t it?” He enquired of his surroundings, arms spread wide in invitation. “That’s where it happened?”

He felt the laugh bubble up again inside him, but the noise barely made it past his lips. He coughed. “I, uh, I know I’m not the brightest crayon in the box. On the best of days,” he offered. “But it had to be something. And it makes sense, that that was it. The angels leaving. Sammy,” he swallowed, hard, fighting back the feeling surging in his chest, “Sam saying yes? Detroit?” 

He was breathing harder now, but he couldn’t feel it. The first prickles of numbness crept into his lungs. “There had to be a reason. Why they would leave. Why he would…”

The silence seemed to rise up to meet him in defiance, but he didn’t care. 

“You gave up,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “That’s when they figured it out. That you weren’t dead, that you just,” he waved a hand, “gave up.”

“And Sam knew. Sam – he knew. So he said yes.”

“You remember Sam, don’t you?” His tone changed, then, and his voice filled with venom. “Little Sammy Winchester. When he didn’t have me or Dad, well, at least he had you, right?”

“ _RIGHT?_ ” he bellowed into the night. Dogs barked in the distance – the faint sound of a window scraping shut.

He dug his flask out and gulped down more of the burning liquid before shoving it back in its place. The pain would keep it down, keep his chest from exploding, keep is body from breaking down on the wet grass. 

“You know,” he snuffled, his eyes welling against his will. “He prayed. _Every_ damn night, he prayed. Like Mom.” He laughed, softly. It was an empty sound, muffled by the moisture. “Angels watching over me.”

“Not anymore,” he looked up. “I got notches in my bones so your _dick_ sons can’t track me down. Can’t force feed me the angel-king, or give me stomach cancer, or rip my brother’s _freaking lungs out_.” His voice trembled as it rose in volume, filled with anger and fire.

That laugh again, sick and wet and full of pain. “But you don’t care, do you? We’re getting torn apart. Sam is … Sam is barely in one piece as it is. And Cas?” he let his eyes fall, glossed over with tears. “Cas is going to fade away. And there’s nothing I can do … to stop it.” 

He choked then, for a moment, caught in the memory of a conversation in a truck. 

Hunched over, he spat on the grass, and gathered himself as the rage rose up to meet him. “This is on you.”

“You hear me?” He lifted his head up, arms still folded over his stomach protectively. “ _THIS IS ON YOU!_ ” He screamed viscerally into the cold stillness of the night, his body convulsing with rage as he punched at the air.

The barks echoed down the street. A light flickered on somewhere, and was quickly switched off again. 

He was on his knees now, the whiskey unable to stopper the flow any longer. He sobbed violently, fisting clumps of grass helplessly as he felt his soul bleed out onto the ground. As the picture-book of 2014 played over again behind his eyelids. A broken smile, empty blue eyes – the mocking whistle-sound of the fallen angel. The hollow man in a white suit – a devil in a Sam mask.

“They’re my family, you _son of a bitch_.” He sputtered between breaths, his words wrecked and incomplete. “They’re _all I have left_.”

His desperate sobs broke through the stillness, but he couldn’t hear anything anymore. 

His breath slowed, finally, until all he could feel was the cold air like needles on the ribbons of tear-tracks down his face. 

“Please,” he said softly, barely above a whisper, aching and desperate and pleading with the very earth in his fists. “They need you. _Where are you?_ ”

It wasn’t until he felt the cold kiss of dew on his face that he realized he’d collapsed, bodily, onto the ground. Slowly, painfully, he rolled onto his back and stared up at the black abyss of sky, void of all stars. 

With one last, violent convulsion he shook himself and brokenly screamed; “ _WHERE ARE YOU?_ ”

And then came the rain.

He stilled himself at the first drop – stunned, his eyes swollen, his face speckled with grass. And as the downpour came, he closed his eyes, and let it wash over him in sheets, like icy hands blessing his skin and sending sparks every which way. Eyes closed, mouth wide to the wonder, he laughed – properly, laughed, deep and from the belly. 

Uncontrollably, unendingly, he laughed as the water soaked through him, chilled him to the bone and kept flooding his senses. 

Freezing, blind, and soaked in muddy water, he laughed until his ribs ached, arms and legs spread wide across the grass.

His laughed slowed, finally, until it sputtered into words, and he kept his eyes pressed closed against the onslaught as he mumbled “oh,” to the heavens, “oh, thank you.”

And from the end of the park bench, a seated figure gazed down on the man spread-eagled in the grass, his own coat heavy with water. Through the pounding of the rain he barely heard Dean’s words to the sky as they hung in the air, but he heard them, nonetheless. 

A new sensation – his blue eyes caught a hint of moisture, of their own design, for the first time in his existence. And he smiled.


End file.
